News

It looks like deconstruction may be commencing at Gunter Valley Dam. Last summer there was an underwater construction company working at the dam, presumably repairing the gates on the intakes. This summer the reservoir has been consistently at very low levels, and in the past few weeks has been drained to the bottom. Sometime this past week, the access road has been improved and earth moving equipment arrived at the dam. A mound of rocks has been placed encircling the intake tower, and an access road for earth moving equipment has been created from the dam breast on its face to the level area near the spillway, and then down to the floor of the valley around the intake tower. There were several groups of people touring the site on my visits Friday and today.

UPDATE 2010-10-22: It looks like whatever the task was is complete for now. The access way down the face of the dam has been closed up and all of the equipment has been removed. A hole has been cut in the intake tower above the lowest intake, possibly for repair of the piping contained within (not sure).

As you may have heard from other sources, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry passed away today. She was the “computer voice” for the majority of the franchise (and also on Family Guy), and appeared one way or another in each Star Trek series, and also in the upcoming movie.

An altered detention letter brought my alma mater into the international spotlight (on the web, at least) today. An unnamed student posted this letter recently, and between Digg and Slashdot, it gained a considerable following. The letter indicates that the student was disciplined for using Firefox, an act which approaches holy war status in certain circles. The attention prompted the school to issue a response stating that the letter was altered and that the student was not disciplined for the use of Firefox. It does prompt one to question what was altered in the letter posted. I would hope they are talking about something more substantial than the blacked out names. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Firefox promotional (“…but he told me that it was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. … he insisted that it was a better browser and that he wasn’t doing anything wrong”) was embellished. It seems to me that a teacher would call it insubordination and leave it at that. In any case, the kid caused a lot of attention, hoax or not. It’d be great to hear what the actual alterations were, and how the school handles the situation with the student, after having caused them a massive PR headache.

CBS is incredible. Having word-wraps the same as MSWord would have been enough for some serious eyebrow-raising, but having fonts, automagic superscripts (of a reduced size), and identical spacing makes it just about irrefutable. What’s worse is Rather defending it. Ignore the politics for a moment, just look at the document samples. A third-grader could have helped you make a better forgery.